Ben Masters
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198766148
- eISBN:
- 9780191820731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198766148.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
This chapter considers how Amis sought to define a new contemporary decorum for a fundamentally indecorous age. Through close readings of Amis’s particular rhythms and rhetorical traits, it shows how ...
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This chapter considers how Amis sought to define a new contemporary decorum for a fundamentally indecorous age. Through close readings of Amis’s particular rhythms and rhetorical traits, it shows how Amis experiments with tone and awryness to create an active mimesis that both reflects and critiques contemporary excesses; and how Amis forges an ‘adjustment-style’ in order to individualize his reader. This chapter also shows how Amis pursues similar concerns to humanistic thinkers like Martha Nussbaum and Wayne C. Booth, while replacing character and human interest with style interest, therefore evolving a provocative literary ethics that rejects the centrality of character. This all builds towards a close comparison of The Information and Yellow Dog, and their varying methods of negotiating the general and the particular.Less
This chapter considers how Amis sought to define a new contemporary decorum for a fundamentally indecorous age. Through close readings of Amis’s particular rhythms and rhetorical traits, it shows how Amis experiments with tone and awryness to create an active mimesis that both reflects and critiques contemporary excesses; and how Amis forges an ‘adjustment-style’ in order to individualize his reader. This chapter also shows how Amis pursues similar concerns to humanistic thinkers like Martha Nussbaum and Wayne C. Booth, while replacing character and human interest with style interest, therefore evolving a provocative literary ethics that rejects the centrality of character. This all builds towards a close comparison of The Information and Yellow Dog, and their varying methods of negotiating the general and the particular.
Martin Randall
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638529
- eISBN:
- 9780748651825
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638529.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book explores the fiction, poetry, theatre and cinema that have represented the 9/11 attacks. Works by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Simon Armitage and Mohsin Hamid are discussed in ...
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This book explores the fiction, poetry, theatre and cinema that have represented the 9/11 attacks. Works by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Simon Armitage and Mohsin Hamid are discussed in relation to the specific problems of writing about such a visually spectacular ‘event’ that has had enormous global implications. Other chapters analyse initial responses to 9/11, the intriguing tensions between fiction and non-fiction, the challenge of describing traumatic history and the ways in which the terrorist attacks have been discussed culturally in the decade since September 11. The book: contributes to the growing literature on 9/11, presenting an overview of some of the main texts that have represented the attacks and their aftermath; focuses on Don DeLillo, adding to the literature surrounding this major American novelist; focuses on Martin Amis, adding to the growing critical work on this much-discussed British novelist and essayist; and provides a critical analysis of the Oscar-winning film Man on Wire, regarding its oblique references to 9/11.Less
This book explores the fiction, poetry, theatre and cinema that have represented the 9/11 attacks. Works by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Simon Armitage and Mohsin Hamid are discussed in relation to the specific problems of writing about such a visually spectacular ‘event’ that has had enormous global implications. Other chapters analyse initial responses to 9/11, the intriguing tensions between fiction and non-fiction, the challenge of describing traumatic history and the ways in which the terrorist attacks have been discussed culturally in the decade since September 11. The book: contributes to the growing literature on 9/11, presenting an overview of some of the main texts that have represented the attacks and their aftermath; focuses on Don DeLillo, adding to the literature surrounding this major American novelist; focuses on Martin Amis, adding to the growing critical work on this much-discussed British novelist and essayist; and provides a critical analysis of the Oscar-winning film Man on Wire, regarding its oblique references to 9/11.
Martin Randall
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638529
- eISBN:
- 9780748651825
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638529.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines Martin Amis' The Second Plane, which is a collection of most of his journalism and stories that were inspired by the attacks. It examines how Amis' criticism and fiction are ...
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This chapter examines Martin Amis' The Second Plane, which is a collection of most of his journalism and stories that were inspired by the attacks. It examines how Amis' criticism and fiction are intertwined, as well as his use of parody in ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’. This chapter views The Second Plane as a fascinating reflection of a writer who is struggling to find ways to speak about the event.Less
This chapter examines Martin Amis' The Second Plane, which is a collection of most of his journalism and stories that were inspired by the attacks. It examines how Amis' criticism and fiction are intertwined, as well as his use of parody in ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’. This chapter views The Second Plane as a fascinating reflection of a writer who is struggling to find ways to speak about the event.
Peter Childs
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748620432
- eISBN:
- 9780748671700
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748620432.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The study of autobiography has been resurgent in recent decades, and the genre is often now discussed by historians, literary critics and others alongside biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, and ...
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The study of autobiography has been resurgent in recent decades, and the genre is often now discussed by historians, literary critics and others alongside biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, and reminiscences – as well as works more conventionally considered ‘history’ or ‘fiction’ -- under the banner of life writing (the term ‘self-life-writing’ is Avrom Fleishman’s). One reason for this is the rise of interdisciplinary areas of study that have found autobiography to be a particularly useful form of writing, and so have accorded it a distinctive place in the study of both authenticity and alterity. In the 1970s, women’s studies, American studies, ethnic and black studies all started to turn to autobiography for voices of ‘experience’ from within, as James Olney sees it. Or, as Martin Amis puts it in his own Experience: ‘what everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel but a memoir. We live in an age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de Coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience – so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed.’Less
The study of autobiography has been resurgent in recent decades, and the genre is often now discussed by historians, literary critics and others alongside biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, and reminiscences – as well as works more conventionally considered ‘history’ or ‘fiction’ -- under the banner of life writing (the term ‘self-life-writing’ is Avrom Fleishman’s). One reason for this is the rise of interdisciplinary areas of study that have found autobiography to be a particularly useful form of writing, and so have accorded it a distinctive place in the study of both authenticity and alterity. In the 1970s, women’s studies, American studies, ethnic and black studies all started to turn to autobiography for voices of ‘experience’ from within, as James Olney sees it. Or, as Martin Amis puts it in his own Experience: ‘what everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel but a memoir. We live in an age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de Coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience – so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed.’
Craig Howes
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824837303
- eISBN:
- 9780824871543
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824837303.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter studies Martin Amis' remark that there is a yawning gap, which separates writers' lives from their literary works. He claims that “the life doesn't shape the writing, nor do the moral ...
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This chapter studies Martin Amis' remark that there is a yawning gap, which separates writers' lives from their literary works. He claims that “the life doesn't shape the writing, nor do the moral lineaments of the life contaminate the work. They are separate things.” Denying this claim is the biography's crime since biographers are in business to say the two are “the same thing, or that they overlap.” He further states that “being more interested in the writer than the writing is just eternal human vulgarity.” These forms of contempt for literary biography had placed him firmly in the critical tradition that warned about the intentional fallacy.Less
This chapter studies Martin Amis' remark that there is a yawning gap, which separates writers' lives from their literary works. He claims that “the life doesn't shape the writing, nor do the moral lineaments of the life contaminate the work. They are separate things.” Denying this claim is the biography's crime since biographers are in business to say the two are “the same thing, or that they overlap.” He further states that “being more interested in the writer than the writing is just eternal human vulgarity.” These forms of contempt for literary biography had placed him firmly in the critical tradition that warned about the intentional fallacy.
Mark Currie
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624249
- eISBN:
- 9780748652037
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624249.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and ...
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This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and demonstrates through a series of arguments and readings that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future offer new analytical perspectives to narrative criticism and theory. The book offers an account of ‘prolepsis’ or ‘flashforward’ in the contemporary novel that retrieves it from the realm of experimentation and places it at the heart of a contemporary mode of being, both personal and collective, which experiences the present as the object of a future memory. With reference to some of the most important recent developments in the philosophy of time, it aims to define a set of questions about tense and temporal reference in narrative that make it possible to reconsider the function of stories in contemporary culture. The text also reopens traditional questions about the difference between literature and philosophy in relation to knowledge of time. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of a range of contemporary fiction by writers such as Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift.Less
This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and demonstrates through a series of arguments and readings that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future offer new analytical perspectives to narrative criticism and theory. The book offers an account of ‘prolepsis’ or ‘flashforward’ in the contemporary novel that retrieves it from the realm of experimentation and places it at the heart of a contemporary mode of being, both personal and collective, which experiences the present as the object of a future memory. With reference to some of the most important recent developments in the philosophy of time, it aims to define a set of questions about tense and temporal reference in narrative that make it possible to reconsider the function of stories in contemporary culture. The text also reopens traditional questions about the difference between literature and philosophy in relation to knowledge of time. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of a range of contemporary fiction by writers such as Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift.
Stephen Morton
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846318498
- eISBN:
- 9781781380758
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846318498.003.0008
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
The concluding chapter considers how the legal and political arguments for detention camps in the US-led ‘war on terror’ draw on the rhetoric of emergency to reinforce the necessity for broader ...
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The concluding chapter considers how the legal and political arguments for detention camps in the US-led ‘war on terror’ draw on the rhetoric of emergency to reinforce the necessity for broader police and/or military powers, and to justify measures that not only contravene the principles of international human rights legislation, but which also resemble the legal, political and military techniques of European colonial powers in the twentieth century. Beginning with a discussion of the legal regime which enabled the detention of ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo Bay, this chapter proceeds to consider how Muslims have been represented in the ‘post-9/11’ fiction of Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. In so doing, I try to address to what extent the ‘post-9/11’ novel participates in the dominant discourse of terrorism. As a counterpoint to such representations, the chapter then moves to consider how contemporary fiction by Muslim writers such as Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie questions and complicates the prevailing tropes and narratives of militant Islam that frame the justification of emergency measures in the ‘war on terror’. Less
The concluding chapter considers how the legal and political arguments for detention camps in the US-led ‘war on terror’ draw on the rhetoric of emergency to reinforce the necessity for broader police and/or military powers, and to justify measures that not only contravene the principles of international human rights legislation, but which also resemble the legal, political and military techniques of European colonial powers in the twentieth century. Beginning with a discussion of the legal regime which enabled the detention of ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo Bay, this chapter proceeds to consider how Muslims have been represented in the ‘post-9/11’ fiction of Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. In so doing, I try to address to what extent the ‘post-9/11’ novel participates in the dominant discourse of terrorism. As a counterpoint to such representations, the chapter then moves to consider how contemporary fiction by Muslim writers such as Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie questions and complicates the prevailing tropes and narratives of militant Islam that frame the justification of emergency measures in the ‘war on terror’.
Mark Currie
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624249
- eISBN:
- 9780748652037
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624249.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter involves the readings of Graham Swift's Waterland and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. Waterland is a novel full of explicit theorisation that finds its application in the storytelling ...
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This chapter involves the readings of Graham Swift's Waterland and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. Waterland is a novel full of explicit theorisation that finds its application in the storytelling itself: a novel which explores the theme of time through the temporal logic of storytelling. A discussion which aims to explain what it is that the contemporary novel has expressed, if anything, about time, is provided. In Amis's Time's Arrow, the disjunction between the narrator and the narrated is not a difference of location in time, but one of the experience of the direction of time. The effect that time reversal seems least in control of is the relationship between the meaning of words and the forward direction of time. Time's Arrow offers a striking example of a contradiction between what the novel does and what it says.Less
This chapter involves the readings of Graham Swift's Waterland and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. Waterland is a novel full of explicit theorisation that finds its application in the storytelling itself: a novel which explores the theme of time through the temporal logic of storytelling. A discussion which aims to explain what it is that the contemporary novel has expressed, if anything, about time, is provided. In Amis's Time's Arrow, the disjunction between the narrator and the narrated is not a difference of location in time, but one of the experience of the direction of time. The effect that time reversal seems least in control of is the relationship between the meaning of words and the forward direction of time. Time's Arrow offers a striking example of a contradiction between what the novel does and what it says.
Ben Masters
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198766148
- eISBN:
- 9780191820731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198766148.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
This final chapter considers how far the broader arguments made about style in the previous chapters could be applied to other economies of novelistic prose (e.g. minimalism), before arguing that ...
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This final chapter considers how far the broader arguments made about style in the previous chapters could be applied to other economies of novelistic prose (e.g. minimalism), before arguing that excess enacts its own peculiar and ethically enriching powers of thought and perception that cannot be so fully activated in a plainer style. To evidence this, it offers quick readings of Burgess, Carter, and Amis’s plainest books, showing how the ethical power of their characteristic styles is muted when the excess is tamed. Excess is shown to be both the product and regulator of the intellectual and political divisions that animate their thinking (especially between the conservative and the transformative), and the key to how their texts affect and engage the reader.Less
This final chapter considers how far the broader arguments made about style in the previous chapters could be applied to other economies of novelistic prose (e.g. minimalism), before arguing that excess enacts its own peculiar and ethically enriching powers of thought and perception that cannot be so fully activated in a plainer style. To evidence this, it offers quick readings of Burgess, Carter, and Amis’s plainest books, showing how the ethical power of their characteristic styles is muted when the excess is tamed. Excess is shown to be both the product and regulator of the intellectual and political divisions that animate their thinking (especially between the conservative and the transformative), and the key to how their texts affect and engage the reader.
Ben Masters
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198766148
- eISBN:
- 9780191820731
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198766148.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a ...
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Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a fresh style of ethical criticism that does not over-rely on notions of character and interiority (the terrain of the ‘humanist revival’), and that returns the author to centre-stage (contra the approach of the ‘new ethics’, with its indebtedness to poststructuralism), Novel Style defends the stylistic excesses of writers who were conscious of both writing out of excessive times and of the need for new kinds of artistic response to contemporary ethical pressures. Through its methodology, Novel Style calls for a return to close reading and aesthetic evaluation and recovers its subjects from theoretical quagmires by repositioning them as stylists and ethicists, arguing that the two positions are inextricable. For example, it considers how forms of stylistic excess—ranging from puns and wordplay to long sentences, proliferating imagery, repetitions, idiosyncratic rhythms, multiple levels of narration, and variable points of view—might enact ethically-charged dynamics like curiosity, particularity, complexity, and empathy. As well as being an impassioned defence of literary excess, flamboyance, and close reading, Novel Style asks fundamental questions about how novels think, see, and feel, and how they might change us.Less
Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a fresh style of ethical criticism that does not over-rely on notions of character and interiority (the terrain of the ‘humanist revival’), and that returns the author to centre-stage (contra the approach of the ‘new ethics’, with its indebtedness to poststructuralism), Novel Style defends the stylistic excesses of writers who were conscious of both writing out of excessive times and of the need for new kinds of artistic response to contemporary ethical pressures. Through its methodology, Novel Style calls for a return to close reading and aesthetic evaluation and recovers its subjects from theoretical quagmires by repositioning them as stylists and ethicists, arguing that the two positions are inextricable. For example, it considers how forms of stylistic excess—ranging from puns and wordplay to long sentences, proliferating imagery, repetitions, idiosyncratic rhythms, multiple levels of narration, and variable points of view—might enact ethically-charged dynamics like curiosity, particularity, complexity, and empathy. As well as being an impassioned defence of literary excess, flamboyance, and close reading, Novel Style asks fundamental questions about how novels think, see, and feel, and how they might change us.
